I'm up early this morning, as I often am, curiously and somewhat hopefully watching the morning news and their web sites for school closings, particularly the school where my wife teaches. I live in Houston, and we have ice on the ground and roads this morning, as we did yesterday morning. A very bizarre event to say the least. Schools have been closing everywhere because the roads are dangerous and drivers don't know how to handle the ice. Unfortunately it looks like I'll be driving my wife in to work today; I'm from Wisconsin so I know what to expect in the roads a little better.
I began to wonder where all of this cold air is coming from. I have movies of my wingnut brother-in-law in my head saying "so there is your global warming. Haha!". Surely there must be some explanation. Science wouldn't fail me. Wingnuttery delusions couldn't triumph what I thought was the truth [of global warming] again this late in the game. Not after November!
So I went to a favorite site that I visit often around the time of year that I made my other weather related posts on DKos, Hurricane season. The Weather Underground is a great site to visit if you want to learn in-depth about current weather events and what are causing them beyond what your local news weatherman is willing to divulge.
I found my explanation for the massive artic blast. It seems meteophiles (is that an english word?) are even sharing my pain, at least the icy part, in San Antonio this week, and have naturally been discussing it at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society
Jeff Master's, the master of weather blogging at Weather Underground speculates:
Mostly, we’ve been grumbling about the nasty ice storm here, which has left city streets deserted and given the local school kids a holiday. Why couldn’t our record warm winter weather have lasted another week?! The large-scale weather pattern over the Northern Hemisphere has indeed changed to a decidedly wintery one, not only for North America, but northern Asia as well. Even Europe appears likely to get some real winter weather starting next week. I speculate that part of the reason for this shift is that the Arctic ice has finally frozen up enough to cut off the extra heat and moisture that was retarding formation of the usual cold Arctic air masses at the beginning of winter. Natural variability of the weather is probably the major factor, though.
I have memories (maybe wrong) of thermaldynamics lessons that say when something freezes, like artic waters, while it freezes energy and heat is drawn out of anything around it. That explains the very cold air's beginnings over this new artic ice and the volumes of it blasting even all the way down here into Houston. Update: water freezing is a curious event.
But why the sudden freezing? I heard last month that lakes and rivers where I am from will not be opening this year for ice fishing because for the first time anyone has ever heard of they will not freeze over thick enough to support ice fishers safely. If you haven't noticed it has been extremely warm this year so far... you must be a southerner.
December has been the warmest on record. In fact it has been scarily warm. I wonder what it will feel like for my brother-in-law (in the movie in my head anyways) to go from laughter to terror. I didn't call him to ask after the elections in November, but I might this time (in the movie in my head he didn't answer the phone).
Jeff Masters reports:
The other big topic of conversation has been the unbelievably warm winter we’ve had up until now. Talks I’ve attended given by meteorologists from both the U.S. and Europe have emphasized how unusual this winter was--and most of 2006. Take a look at the newly-released image (Figure 1) of the warmest December on record for the globe. The average global temperature for December 2006 was +0.72°C (+1.30°F) above normal, beating out 2003's record of +0.70°C/1.26°F, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Much of the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Siberia recorded their warmest December ever. Below normal temperatures were recorded in the Middle East and northern Africa, but over 80% of the world’s land areas were warmer than average--and not just a little above average! The swath of temperatures more than 5°C (9 °F) above average covering most of the world’s land mass north of 40° north latitude is unprecedented in size in the wintertime historical record, going back to at least 1900.
This is what they have been looking at, courtesy National Climate Data Center.
5C is about 9F to Democrats and Republicans alike. Another scary movie I have in my mind is the one of the Greenland and Antartic ice sheets melting away out of control while we all stand by helplessly and watch our oceans rise 20 feet, flooding the World Trade Center grounds, most of Miami, 1/2 of Louisana and Florida, and trying not to look outside our country at the devestation happening elsewhere like Bangledesh and those beautiful Pacific and Carribean Islands we all dream about.
WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE FOR EVERYONE TO WAKE UP?
I think it is safe to say if this winters data points plot into next year and on that the 50- 100 years we thought we had will be more like 20-30.
We Don't Have Any More Time.
My wife's alarm clock just went off. Did yours?